Three people were killed, more than 250 people were injured and a city was left reeling as twin bombs detonated at the Boston Marathon last week.

Not only was it a tragic event for Boston and America, it reached all the way across the world to China. One of the young people killed was a woman named Lingzi Lu. She was a graduate student at Boston University and had gone to watch a friend run in the marathon.

Just days after the bombings, ABC News correspondent Gloria Riviera was one of the few - if not the only - American journalists to travel to Lu’s hometown in northeast China and speak with her family.

Lu was born and grew up in Shenyang. Her family lives there still and their daughter embodied China’s middle-class aspirations. She was their only child under China’s one-child policy.

“When she was born, it was my first time being an uncle,” said Lu Xiang. “The first time that she called me uncle, my heart melted.”

Tibet is known as the “roof of the world,” where starkly beautiful mountain peaks and windswept plateaus belie the fact that this area of nearly 500,000 square miles in Central Asia has been hotly contested for much of the past century.

The exiled spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people describes himself as a “simple Buddhist monk,” but is known the world over as the Dalai Lama. ABC News Correspondent Muhammad Lila sat down with him at his home in Dharamsala, India, for a wide-ranging interview that included the subject of Tibet.

China administers the area – a quarter of its territory -- as an autonomous region but as a historic and rightful part of the Chinese mainland. But Tibetans believe China invaded a sovereign nation when its troops took control in 1950. Since that time, Tibetans – both in the region and in exile abroad -- have agitated for independence through protests and uprisings, which have been violently suppressed within Tibet. Since the 1980s, the Dalai Lama

Life in Africa seems to be an endless cycle of war, famine, disease and destruction. Or so news reports of the continent would indicate, where the maxim “it bleeds, it leads” governs much of the coverage. But alongside these very real problems, there is an everyday life for the billion or so Africans that is not much different from the rest of the world.

“Everyday Africa” is an online photography project attempting to change the negative perceptions and stereotypes of the continent. Professional photographers living and working in different parts of Africa take photos on their smartphones and post them on the project’s Tumblr and Instagram feed.

“It’s not a place of war and famine and destruction and all these horrible things,” said Austin Merrill, a journalist and co-creator of the project. “It’s a place where normal people do normal things all the time, just like we do.”